The Shameless Showmanship of Surfwise

Doug Pray's new documentary Surfwise is the best surf movie we've seen that's not actually about surfing.

You're more interested in Doug Pray's fascinating new documentary Surfwise than you think you are -- unless you actually yearn to see yet another Endless Summer montage of carefree dudes conquering mammoth waves. Not only is Surfwise not really about surfing, but Pray, who's previously made fine but fairly conventional music docs (Hype!,Scratch), is in no particular hurry to reveal what it is about. Docs have been moving away from vérité integrity and embracing stunts ever since Michael Moore's Roger & Me, but this is the first one that boasts a mid-film "plot twist" to rival the casual oh-by-the-way mindfucks of Lost. And yet I wonder whether Pray himself recognizes what's most bizarre about his movie.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

That is, apart from the octogenarian dude we see in the opening scenes, riding an exercise bike naked and rambling about how his life changed when he finally learned how to eat pussy. This aggressively eccentric coot is Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, who back in the '50s abruptly abandoned his lucrative medical practice and decided to spend the rest of his life as a surf-happy nomad. He and wife, Juliette, speedily produced nine children (eight of them boys), and the entire brood lived in a single 24-foot camper, traveling from beach to beach in search of the perfect wave. Nobody went to school or was in any way homeschooled; the kids were raised almost oblivious to everything except the pleasure of the moment.

More From Esquire

Pray interviews all nine of the Paskowitz kids, now middle-aged, at length, and he has no qualms about manipulating us with their craftily edited reminiscences. Only midway through Surfwise does it become clear that what we assumed to be a paean to hedonism and "following your bliss" is in fact an examination of ruined lives and that many of Doc's offspring now view the family's protohippie lifestyle as a singular form of child abuse -- one that permanently impaired their ability to function in everyday society, since all they know how to do is eat macrobiotic food, sleep four to a bed, and surf.

Pretty compelling stuff. And yet, when the movie ended, I wasn't thinking about the importance of traditional education or the morality of having raucous sex two feet away from your preadolescent children or about the family as cult. I was wondering where the hell all the cameras came from.

Surfwise is crammed with vintage photos and Super 8 movie footage of the family's adventures. As bizarre as they may otherwise seem, and however ascetic they professed to be, the Paskowitzes possessed the same mania for self-documentation that the rest of us do.

I remember being equally flummoxed by the copious home-movie footage that turned up in the award-winning doc Capturing the Friedmans, about a Long Island family torn apart when two members were arrested for child molestation back in the late '80s. Now, though, I'm starting to think we might soon feel nostalgic for documentaries like these, featuring images nobody ever expected might one day become part of a feature film. At this point, we're all consciously or unconsciously crafting our own biopics on a daily basis.

Surfwise demonstrates both stages of this trend. The lack of self-consciousness evident in all the stills and movies that were shot back in the '60s and '70s finds a queasy, distorted reflection in the final sequence: a reunion of the entire Paskowitz family. Some of the kids, like eldest son David, had been estranged from their parents and/or certain siblings for many years, and there's something supremely discomfiting about watching them tearfully embrace even as they know full well that Pray and his camera are just a few feet away, recording the tender moment for posterity and profit. Those feeling even less charitable might conclude that this reunion was arranged less because the family needed closure than because Surfwise needed an ending. It's the essence of the modern condition: You can't stop watching, but every fiber of your being is still shouting, "Put the goddamn camera down!"